Physical Science: Color Intro

For the first half of the period today, my students presented their research projects on different energy sources. Once that was finished, we started on color. I started by having students watch a short video that I blatantly copied from Frank Noschese that shows red ink and red light through both red and blue filters. I like the video because I can show all my students at once and I like having my own version so students can look at the clock and paper I used in the video to verify I wasn’t using some kind of trickery. I asked students to record their observations from the video, then try to come up with a hypothesis to explain their observations. This lead nicely into a lab where students look at things through filter paddles. Once students finish the lab, we’ll revisit the video to see how their explanation has changed.

Physics: Collaborative Problem Solving

I took a problem from Casey Rutherford’s projectile motion packet about a block given a push up a ramp with friction, then allowed to fly off the end of the ramp to become a projectile. One of the things I love about this problem is it requires to students to use just about everything from the trimester. 2nd hour, students did whiteboard speed dating, but I put a couple of goal-less problems first so students didn’t have much time to work on it, but were intrigued enough by the problem that they asked to continue next week. 4th hour, I decided to start with that problem. I had students work in groups using the roles from the University of Minnesota’s Cooperative Group Problem Solving protocol. It took most of the hour, but students were consistently successful and even my top students were challenged. It was great to see the obvious pride when students finally got the correct answer.